Overview
An independent trading card resale business operating primarily on TCGPlayer, with a custom Excel VBA automation layer built to handle the parts that don’t scale manually — specifically repricing.
The core of the tooling is a dynamic repricing engine that takes multiple inputs and outputs updated prices across the inventory without manual calculation.
The Repricing Engine
Manually keeping prices competitive across a large inventory isn’t realistic. The VBA tool pulls together several factors and calculates a target price for each card:
- Current low — what the market floor looks like right now on TCGPlayer
- Market price — the rolling average buyers are actually paying
- Quantity on hand — more copies = more aggressive pricing; low stock = less pressure to undercut
- Sales velocity — time since last sale; stale listings get nudged down, fast movers get room to hold price
- Cost basis & rarity — floor prices and markup percentages are tiered by rarity and what was paid, so high-value or expensive-to-source cards are protected from accidental underpricing
- Staple floors — certain high-demand cards get a hard minimum regardless of market conditions
The result: one run of the tool and the entire inventory reprices itself based on current conditions rather than gut feel or manual comparisons.
Inventory Management
Beyond pricing, the tooling tracks:
- Stock levels and restock needs
- Excess inventory flags for cards that have sat too long
- Cost basis per card for margin visibility
- Order fulfillment status
Why VBA
The business already lived in Excel. VBA let me automate directly within that workflow without adding external tools, APIs, or dependencies. The entire system is self-contained — open the file, run the tool, prices are updated.
Platform
Sold exclusively on TCGPlayer. Inventory spans multiple TCG titles, primarily Flesh and Blood.